It is a frequent occurrence in the case of modern office workplaces that a telephone conference is initiated by way of a telephone private branch exchange in order to implement meetings between employees. In this respect, a telephone conference can be convened on an ad hoc basis or be fixed for a specific appointment on a scheduled basis.
So-called PIM (Personal Information Management) systems or collaboration systems—also referred to as groupware—are frequently employed for planning meeting appointments. As at the time of the patent application, representatives of such systems comprise for example the products Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. PIM systems provide functions for planning a meeting where normally a user of the PIM System enters desired participants of a meeting, the period for the meeting, and further information such as the agenda for the meeting in an electronic form of a PIM client or a PIM application on a computer.
The participants of a meeting are frequently identified by way of their e-mail addresses in such PIM systems, so that after the electronic form has been filled out and sent, an e-mail can be transferred to the desired participants of the meeting with the further data on the electronic form. The desired participants of the meeting then receive an invitation to the meeting in their respective PIM application which they can then agree to or decline.
Usually, at office workplaces, meetings such as telephone conferences are scheduled manually by means of user inputs by way of the PIM system. In spite of being supported by the PIM system, the scheduling of such meetings frequently requires many manual steps, e.g. ascertaining e-mail addresses for the purposes of sending the meeting inquiry to the meeting participants, and determining the telephone numbers of the meeting participants for the purposes of implementing the telephone conference.